Archive for the ‘Water and Sanitation’ category

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How Access to Safe Water can Empower Girls

August 25th, 2011

By: Hope Randall, DefeatDD

In my work to raise awareness about the global burden of diarrheal disease, I read a lot about the many benefits of safe water and sanitation, including the promise it holds for girls and women. But whenever I think about its impact, I don’t think of a specific report or news article. I think about a timid, obedient girl I met in a tiny village in Western Kenya. She moved carefully in a bright green dress as she demonstrated how she gathers water for her family from a contaminated spring. I could tell she’d been doing it for a long time, as she skimmed the surface of the water with the bottom of her bright yellow container in a sincere, yet unsuccessful, attempt to clear the debris.

My heart ached as I watched her. I could see her life play out as I heard it in those reports and news articles, with heart-breaking predictability. Too many girls just like her sacrifice so much – their education, their safety, and endless hours of time – in a constant pursuit of water that may not even be safe to drink. Some estimates from Ethiopia predict that a girl can spend up to 8 hours – an entire workday – on solitary walks to remote water sources, making education impossible. In communities that are fortunate enough to have a safe water source close by, girls’ education and safety still suffers when there are no sanitation facilities at school. A study in Rwanda showed that about a third of girls chose not to attend school during their menstrual cycle because they were spied on or laughed at by boys. » Read more: How Access to Safe Water can Empower Girls

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Posted in Maternal Health, Water and Sanitation, World Water Week 2011

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Water and NTD Programs in Chiapas, Mexico

August 24th, 2011

Unlike other regions of the world, Latin America and the Caribbean is poised for unprecedented success in the fight against NTDs.  Today, SIWI’s World Water Week hosted an event entitled “Fighting Poverty in Latin America: Integrating Water and Health Initiatives.”

Water and sanitation is a major obstacle to successfully eliminating NTDs, and at a special session focusing on water and NTDs, representatives from Global Network, the Inter-American Development Bank, and FEMSA discussed the opportunities that exist when NTD treatments are integrated with water and sanitation interventions.  The audience at SIWI got a sneak peak at a video showcasing some of the efforts to combat NTDs in Chiapas, Mexico.  The program uses a community-based approach to get patients the health resources they need.

See what’s being done to end the neglect in Mexico!


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Posted in Latin America and the Caribbean, Water and Sanitation, World Water Week 2011

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FEMSA Foundation Fights Poverty in Latin America using Water and NTD Initiatives

August 24th, 2011

Today the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases is participating in a seminar at World Water Week. We will be joined by the FEMSA Foundation to discuss the current state of water and NTD programs within the Latin America and Caribbean region along with covering past successes and future next steps. In the blog post below, Vidal Garza Cantú, Director of the FEMSA Foundation, gives an overview of FEMSA’s work and provides further details on today’s LAC-focused seminar at the 2011 World Water Week.

By: Vidal Garza Cantú, Director of the FEMSA Foundation

FEMSA Foundation is a corporate social investment instrument. What this means is that, with support from FEMSA, the Foundation invests resources to further projects that will improve the overall outlook of communities. Upon starting our activities, we found through research that one of the best ways to really have an impact on people’s opportunities for a better life was to invest in water-related interventions. Today 80% of our projects belong to our Sustainable of Water Resources strategic area. The other 20% belongs to our Quality of Life strategic area, which focuses on the improvement of nutrition, on health, and on biotechnology.

We knew the incredible power water had over people’s lives and we wanted to look for ways for our two strategic areas to converge and increase the impact we had on communities. Water and health seemed to be the perfect match. One of the results we already expected to achieve through our access to safe water interventions was the decrease of disease in the benefited population. In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, rural communities are often burdened by life-threatening diseases due to contaminated water sources. Children, our future, are among the most afflicted demographics. We wanted to put together our experience on water-related intervention with our capabilities on the health front and join our two strategic areas to increase the true impact for people. But we knew that we could never do it alone.

» Read more: FEMSA Foundation Fights Poverty in Latin America using Water and NTD Initiatives

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Posted in Latin America and the Caribbean, Water and Sanitation, World Water Week 2011

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Water and Sanitation to tackle NTDs in Latin America and the Caribbean – the IDB perspective Part 2

August 24th, 2011

Below is the second and last installment of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)’s series for World Water Week. In this entry, Josh Colston talks about the water and sanitation projects in Latin American and the Caribbean supported by IDB.

By: Josh Colston, Inter-American Development Bank, Social Sector

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) NTD Initiative is a partnership between the IDB, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases. As the regional development bank for LAC, with projects in many different sectors, one of the things that the IDB brings to the partnership is the ability to facilitate this integration. We can collaborate with our colleagues in different departments, whose projects tackle NTD risk factors to include effective, low cost public health activities within their projects.

A good example of this is a project in Guyana’s capital city of Georgetown. Georgetown has a poor drainage system consisting of basic trenches, running alongside the roads. Lying close to sea level, the city is prone to severe and prolonged flooding during the rainy season, while the aging sewerage system regularly leaks. These problems cause wastewater to overflow into the drainage trenches and back-up into the streets and backyards. This in turn causes populations of mosquitoes – a vector for lymphatic filariasis (LF) – and soil-transmitted helminths (STH) transmission to rise. The water and sanitation division of the IDB has a project to improve the city’s sewerage system. Our NTD Initiative has therefore seized the opportunity to add a health component to this project. In this way, we are uniquely placed to bring together medical interventions with longer-term environmental improvements that will have a combined impact on the two diseases.

Happily, another way in which LAC is unique is that the elimination of several NTDs – Trachoma, Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic Filariasis among them – is a genuinely feasible goal in the short term. With this multi-sectoral approach, the IDB and its partners are going to play a small role in achieving this goal. But when it is reached, the real credit will have to go to the countries themselves – the governments, health workers and communities that made the final push to end the neglect, and rid the region of these major causes of disability, social-exclusion and unhappiness.

Josh Colston is a consultant in demography and epidemiology at the IDB, where he works on issues such as infectious diseases of poverty, maternal and child health and nutrition, and climate change and health.

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Posted in Latin America and the Caribbean, Water and Sanitation, World Water Week 2011

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